The other day Public Discourse ran my piece entitled “A De-Sexed Society is a De-Humanized Society.” It was my analysis of President Obama’s directive to enforce a transgender policy on all K-12 bathroom and locker room facilities throughout the nation. We need to understand that this project has nothing to do with “gender identity” or civil rights for anybody. That’s the pretext, sure. But the endgame is to abolish all sex distinctions in law. That’s definitely the trajectory we’re on. We can already see the telltale signs with government documents such as passport applications no longer allowing for the identification of mother and father, but only the more generic term “parent.” In Canada, nine plaintiffs to the high court have sought to have sex distinctions removed from all birth certificates.

So obviously, this agenda applies universally. We need to get that through our heads. It’s not about transgender individuals. They are merely the vehicles, the pawns that the administration is using to push this project through. But in the end, it’s about every single one of us. It means we are all in the de-humanizing process of being legally “de-sexed.” And like sheep to the slaughter, so many of us just don’t seem to get it.

This “gender identity” nonsense is the cornerstone of probably the biggest social engineering project in human history. That’s because it will allow the mass state to treat us only as isolated individuals, separated from our familial relationships. When the State no longer has to recognize the existence of “male” or “female,” would it have to recognize the existence of a husband and wife or a mother and father? I don’t think so. Nor any other biological relationship. And therefore, no relationships at all. This would eventually wipe out spousal immunity, which means the state can force spouses to testify against one another in court. It puts the State in a stronger position to regulate personal relationships. As you know, my theme on this blog is that personal relationships are the source of all real power. So if you go along with this transgender project, I believe you are ceding that power to the state (for everybody) whether you know it or not.

Of course, no law can make reality go away. But the force of law can manipulate you to behave as though reality has gone away. Here’s an excerpt from my article, which I hope you’ll read:

What will happen when all of society is sexless in both language and law? If the law does not recognize your body as physically male or female—applying only the word “gender” to your internal, self-reported self-perception—does the law even recognize your body? Every single cell of you has either “male” or “female” written into its DNA, but the law refuses to recognize such categories. Such laws will only recognize an infinite, immeasurable “gender spectrum,” your place on which is determined only by your mind. So what exactly are you after the law has de-sexed you? In what sense is your body a legal entity?

And what happens to your familial relationships after the law has de-sexed you? Are they legally recognized? I don’t see how they could be. Certainly not by default, certainly not by the recognition that each child comes through the union of two opposite-sex parents.

In the end, there is nothing “brave” about this new world chaos. Just sheer insanity.

The symbol of the transgender movement combines astrological symbols for male (Mars) and female (Venus) with shades of blue and pink. (Wikimedia Commons) Even if I didn’t know what it stood for, I’d take pause because it just feels so swastika-ish.

The other day I published an essay at The Federalist about the political significance of South Dakota Governor Dennis Daugaard’s caving to the mafia-style tactics of the LGBT lobby. He was the latest in a string of GOP governors who are shrinking from laws that protect freedom of conscience as well as children’s privacy. You can read it here: “South Dakota’s Governor Tucks Tail, and Runs from LGBT Mafia.”

After the South Dakota legislature passed a bill to allow schools to maintain separate restroom and locker room facilities for males and females, Gov. Daugaard actually vetoed the bill. His veto was basically the result of the craven cronyism that has saturated the corporate world. Big business has been infused with the LGBT agenda for decades now, and their leaders at Chambers of Commerce everywhere generally do the bidding of the LGBT lobby. In addition to corporate pressure, Daugaard personally met with transgender activists who no doubt played victim while making clear that anything less than a veto would get him publicly tarred and feathered.

That article followed on one I co-authored last week with with Joy Pullmann: “The Transgender War Against Science, Human Rights, and Consent.” In it we investigated legislation – such as that passed by South Dakota’s legislature – that would allow access to school children’s restrooms and locker rooms to continue as it always has: according to anatomical sex. Another South Dakota bill was aptly titled “An Act to Ensure Government Nondiscrimination in Matters of Religious Beliefs and Moral Convictions.” In other words, if you have serious beliefs about sex, marriage, and children, you needn’t be forced to perform acts that violate your conscience or totally gag yourself for fear of being fired. But that bill was tabled, which is a grim sign for the future of freedom of conscience.

We had high hopes that Governor Daugaard of South Dakota would stand strong on principle and sign that legislation into law — or at least take no action and allow it to become law. But between the well-monied LGBT lobby and the business world it controls, it seems a pipe dream to expect any official to stand on principle these days. The irony is that probably 90 percent of the population is on board with the South Dakota legislation to support freedom of conscience and privacy. But the heckler’s veto can be a strong one if good people remain silent in the face of it.

Here are a few excerpts from that article on how the LGBT heckler’s veto works:

Their prescription was to first de-sensitize the public. Then to “jam” or suppress every word of dissent. Finally, everyone must convert. This cultivates a conditioned population. Once we are conditioned in this manner, we end up accepting agendas and programs that we’d at least question if our society respected clear and free thinking. Instead, people either self-censor or conform to the party line out of hope for social acceptance.

Representative government requires the citizens, who are themselves the source of our government’s authority, to be able to openly discuss social questions among themselves and consequently direct their representatives.

If we are afraid or taught not to speak, representative government cannot happen. Tiny factions like the LGBT lobby wield power over an unwilling populace, which breeds resentment against government for not aligning with our priorities. Political correctness therefore eviscerates government by consent; under it, government operates based on brute force, which escalates public disapproval in a constant cycle until the social repression is broken—sometimes with (God forbid) violence.

Few people have considered my thesis which is stated in the title above. Most assume the transgender movement is just a simple matter of protecting from discrimination a tiny demographic — .03 percent of the population who consider themselves transgender. Far from it. When you consider the enormous degree of state-sponsored censorship that is required by the movement — and the punishments meted out to people of conscience by each and every one of the laws its activists seek to pass — a far different story reveals itself.

Last week I spoke about all of this to an audience at the Family Research Council in Washington. You can watch the video by clicking on this link:

My goal was not to discuss the finer points of “gender identity” and what being transgender means for any particular individual. Instead, I focused on the broader and bigger picture of what the transgender ideology means for society at large. Transgenderism is an ideology that is based on the presumption that all human beings have something called a “gender identity that may or may not match the sex they were assigned at birth.” Notice how the word “assigned” is used to hide the reality that your biological sex is based in physical reality. This premise is written into every gender identity non-discrimination law. It basically aims to legally erase male and female sex distinctions. It applies universally — to each and every one of us.

The implications are vast — for our language, for our relationships, for preserving a free society. There can be no question that all of the gender identity anti-discrimination laws amount to little more than censorship laws, intended to modify everybody’s behavior and everybody’s language on pain of punishment.

So, in short, the transgender movement is operating as a vehicle for conformity of thought. And in the end, that means it is a vehicle for dismantling freedom – in the name of freedom – and for building the power of the State. In the end, it puts laws into place that abolish the right to free expression and suppress independent thought. The power of the state enters that vacuum, as it always does under such circumstances.

I’ve identified four features of the transgender movement that serve as indicators of its role as a vehicle for state centralization of power:

Transgenderism is such an extreme form of individualism that accommodating it in law will only create a vacuum for State power. By its very nature it demands that an individual’s inner sense of reality trump any commonly held understanding of reality. This makes it unsustainable. Its extreme individualism demands the breakdown of society’s mediating institutions – such as family, faith, and private associations — that serve as buffer zones that protect the individual from State meddling.

Transgenderism sows chaos into the language, requiring us all – universally and without exception – to accept a seismic change in the definition of what it means to be human, and what relationships mean, particularly family relationships. Freedom of speech and association are casualities.

It requires a very aggressive program of censorship in order to sustain itself and prop up its illusions over any commonly understood reality.

It depends on a very aggressive campaign of agitation and propaganda to condition people to get with the program.

It thereby sows the conditions for totalitarianism. We have no choice but to speak out in the face of its censorship. For more, see my talk at the link above. And let’s never forget that free speech is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition.

Public opinion is increasingly a reflection of what people are willing to say based on their sense of social rewards and punishments for expressing an opinion. (Graphic source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Social-media-communication.png )

If we revisit the example of the “quick public opinion shift” on same sex marriage — which was basically an implausible idea 15 years ago — we might ask: why did the activist push for it became so fast and furious? Couldn’t the idea withstand real public discourse and stand on its own merits without extreme public shaming of anyone who had doubts? Couldn’t it have come about through the legislative process without an activist judge overturning the referendum results of an entire state? Or Supreme Court justices claiming that those opposed were filled with “animus?”

The answer is a resounding “No.” In a previous post, I mentioned how availability cascades — opinion cascades, particularly on ideas that seem implausible — rely on a great deal of propaganda and agitation, through political correctness. They are very fragile things. The survival of such opinion cascades requires a lot of tweaking and teasing and discipline and balancing acts by those pushing them, including activists, politicians, celebrities, academics, media moguls. This is the way you get masses mobilized to pretend they’re impressed with a naked emperor’s new clothes. It’s all about conditioning.

The process has a limited life span, and must be applied to public policy before the window of opportunity closes. Polls actually showed that public opinion for same sex marriage had already peaked by the time the Supreme Court made it a done deal in the Obergefell decision last year. But we can’t really know what people believe when the environment for free speech on such an issue is so hostile that most who disagree would be loath to express it.

You may recall how Brendan Eich was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla, essentially for a thought crime. When activists discovered that Eich had made a private donation to the Proposition 8 referendum in California to preserve the legal definition of marriage as one-man and one-woman, they “outed” him and set him up for a virtual public hanging. The point was not only to get him to recant — which, to his credit, he did not do — but to warn the public that free exchange of ideas on this issue was forbidden.

Through propaganda and agitation, you get behavior modification on a mass scale. Yesterday it was same sex marriage. Today it is transgenderism. Tomorrow? It could be absolutely anything at all.

Last month I was on Vicki McKenna’s radio show discussing the effect that propaganda, specifically political correctness, has on us as individuals — how it isolates us from others as we silence ourselves out of the fear of being socially cast out because of our opinions. Vicki and I also discussed how political correctness affects society at large. By conditioning people into policing their own speech, political correctness cultivates a surveillance state in which people increasingly police the speech of others. I hope you’ll have a chance to listen. My segment starts at about 19:00 at this link:

Professor Lopez and I discussed the current unrest on college campuses. Why do so many students today seem unable or unwilling to engage other points of view? Why do so many feel the need to retreat to “safe spaces” whenever they encounter a word or thought that “triggers” negative emotions? Why are they so incoherent? So hostile? So blindly obedient to leftist agendas? So divorced from reality? To explore these questions, listen in!

Professor Lopez, author of Jephthah’s Daughters: Innocent Casualties in the War for Marriage ‘Equality’ has been targeted and harassed for the past several years by the LGBT lobby. This is not only because of Lopez’s stance against same-sex marriage, but because he has a compelling story of his own: He was raised by lesbians and identifies as bisexual. (He may also be the object of their scorn because he has been faithfully married to the mother of his children for 15 years.) The “diversity” bureaucrats at Cal State Northridge have worked tirelessly to concoct a case against Professor Lopez. The video clip below will give you a brief summary of Professor Lopez’s insights:

I offered “Ten Resources for Hack-Proofing Your Mind” in my Federalist article earlier this week, and I list them below. We need far more conversations about how political correctness – i.e., coercive thought reform – undermines our ability to think independently. We also need to understand that when we lose the capacity to think freely, our minds become extremely vulnerable to being manipulated. On a mass scale, this is very bad for any society.

The resources below can help us inoculate ourselves against the process of extreme undue influence or brainwashing . It’s a process that has no doubt affected the members of the death cult we call ISIS. We can see the dangerous effects of undue influence in various other cults as well. And we can also see that after decades of political correctness, coercive thought reform has become the order of the day on college campuses, coercing conformity among students. In fact, any student who simply wishes to be left alone to pursue studies can end up harassed, like those who were hounded by protesters in the library at Dartmouth recently. You can watch that incident here:

But I don’t believe those student agitators are really free agents. Their resentments have been so cultivated, and their access to diversity of thought has been so cut off, that they behave more like they have been mind-hacked by elites who have shamelessly recruited them for their own purposes.

The “safe spaces” that campus agitators demand really serve as little more than Pavlovian conditioning chambers that isolate them and guard them from exploring unofficial ideas. This way they are kept “safe” as fodder for demagogues and propagandists. What the students really need – what we all really need – are sane spaces where we can exchange ideas and develop friendships and goodwill.

A big part of the problem is that there has been precious little public understanding about the dynamics of coercive persuasion, and too little self-awareness about how vulnerable we all are to it. So I’ve prepared a very select list of materials that I think are well worth exploring. Ideally, people would consider these titles for book club discussions. For a summary of each entry, you can go to my Federalist article:

A while back, I posted a blog entry on the Marseillaise scene in the movie Casablanca. I feel compelled to run this entry again as we contemplate yesterday’s terrorist attack on Paris. Whenever we forget that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, we lose. Let’s never forget that, as well as the fact that our little acts of resistance add up, even if they may seem in vain. As Vaclav Havel pointed out in “The Power of the Powerless,” these acts of resistance have an illuminating effect. This is also very relevant as we contemplate the full frontal attacks on the First Amendment happening on college campuses these days. Below is my post from February 28, 2014:

After entry of the US into WWII, Warner Brothers released the classic Casablanca (1942) starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. One scene in Casablanca offers a magnificent juxtaposition with the Bavarian pub scene from The Mortal Storm (1940) discussed in the last post. The place is similar: another restaurant– Rick’s Cafe Americain. Also similar is a cast of Nazi officers, stirring up song (this one “Die Wacht am Rhein.”) But the similarities end there, when one man, Victor Laszlo, tells the orchestra to play the “La Marseillaise.” A thrilled and grateful clientele all rise spontaneously and triumphantly, drowning out the Nazis’ song.

Watch here:

If Laszlo hadn’t done what he did, what then? Chances are everyone would just sit around sulking. The Nazis would then stir up enough folks to sing along with them to the point that the Nazi narrative would seem the majority view. Morale would continue to plummet.

It’s the little acts of resistance that add up to make the biggest difference. These acts plant seeds in others, creating a cascade effect. Sad to say, it’s the power mongers of the world who seem to know this better than the rest of us do. That’s why they insist on our silence as a way station on their road to total control. So let’s not hide our light.

If I had one key theme I hope listeners will come away with, it is this: Our personal relationships are the prime target of political correctness. Full control of one-on-one relationships has always been the aim of tyrants, throughout history. The outlets — media,academia and Hollywood — are basically just means for capturing the big prize of controlling personal relationships. That is why we must not allow PC to silence us.

Here’s an excerpt of the text:

“If you push an agenda to centralize power, you need mass ignorance and effective propaganda.”

Morabito says political correctness provides “a semantic fog where manipulation can occur under the guise of being fair or non-discriminatory.”

She details three tactics of the manipulation she observes. These include being subtle enough that people are not aware of the manipulation, changing our language to achieve thought control and the leverage of social isolation being used to force conformity to the elite’s narratives.

As for those who dissent from the elite’s orthodoxy or narratives, Morabito praises their courage. She mentions three positive possibilities of people who have the courage to be politically incorrect against the dominant narratives in this culture. First, such a neighbor or friend could embolden a like-minded person who is fearful, causing a positive “ripple effect.” Second, they could influence a “fence-sitter” by nudging deeper thinking, she says. And lastly, even if the listener disagrees and rejects your point of view, you may water down the stereotype or caricature made of those who hold core American principles.

I’ve added another mother-child painting by Mary Cassatt to accompany my post today because I find her work so beautiful and inspirational. It also serve to remind us that this is the most basic of all human relationships. Without healthy family bonds — cultivated through the mother-child bond — a lot goes haywire in the world around us. With family breakdown we get community breakdown. And now we’re dealing with whole scale communication breakdown.

This post is a re-cap of several pieces I wrote this week on how to break the PC-cultivated spiral of silence. Isn’t it crazy how much we are expected to police our speech — and therefore our thoughts — in everyday life? One example is how the media schools us in how to use pronouns, assuming we are all draftees into its scam of transgenderism. We also read about how millennials on college campuses have developed such delicate sensitivities to any non-PC expression that they get “triggered” into emotional meltdowns. As we walk among the eggshells, we can all use a few pointers in navigation.

I’ve been trying to provide a little bit of a primer this week in my five-part series at the British web magazine The Conservative Woman. We can not address the breakdown in communication until we understand the root causes of it.

Tuesday’s headline was: “PC Propaganda is intended to Divide and Rule.” The one critical fact to remember about political correctness is that separates people. The intended effect is to prevent you from having personal relationships and personal conversations that could get in the way of a PC agenda. In fact people are excessively policing their own speech when talking to folks who could be their friends: neighbors, co-workers, classmates. We need to push back hard against this sort of meddling.

On Wednesday I wrote “Fear Powers the PC Machine.” Hollywood, Academia and the Media fuel it. It’s so important to become self-aware, and recognize our weaknesses as human beings. Our fear is ultimately about being separated from others if we step out of line. How ironic then, that we actually perpetuate this cycle by feeding the PC Machine with our fear — separating ourselves even more from others.

Today’s headline is: “Only Connect to Fight Back Against the PC Tyranny.” This means, basically, what we must do in order to help unravel the tyranny is create the ripple effects of trust and openness in your daily life by connecting one on one with others. Trust and friendship have a powerful effect in a age that’s becoming increasingly devoid of those things. Friendship, in fact, is inextricably linked with freedom.

Tomorrow’s post will include a few rules of engagement as we go about breaking the ice with our neighbors, co-workers, and others we meet in daily life. I hope you’ll check www.conservativewoman.co.uk to read up. It’s critical that we engage.